


my most imaginary friend

by fueledbysquee



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Gen, Twitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-08
Updated: 2009-09-08
Packaged: 2018-01-09 04:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1141480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fueledbysquee/pseuds/fueledbysquee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete is lonely.  Pete takes the opportunity to coax Patrick into the wonderful world of social networking.  Pete's awesome, logical ideas have a habit of getting away from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my most imaginary friend

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome back to fueledbysquee's house of effectively-gen fic. wtf, brain?
> 
> Written for[bandom_flashfic](http://bandom-flashfic.livejournal.com/)'s twitter challenge

Patrick picks up the phone, which is good, but he answers with, "For fuck's sake, Pete, what is it now?" which is not.

"Paaaaaatrick, I neeeeeed you," Pete says. It's sort of true, but is mostly just stalling for time, because he's pretty sure that he's 3 links past whatever it was that he needed to tell Patrick about when he dialed the phone. He clicks back a few times without producing any likely candidates.

Patrick's sometimes-inaudible sigh comes through the phone loud and clear, and Pete starts to feel bad for interrupting without a good plan, pictures an irritated frown creasing Patrick's forehead. "No, you don't, Pete," Patrick says. "You need a nap and a sippy cup of juice, maybe, but you don't need me."

"Fair enough," Pete admits, clicking back a few more times. "You need me, though. You need a break, and I-"

"No," Patrick interrupts. "What I need is to finish this track and be _done_ , not to take a break that will put us further behind schedule."

"I just-" Pete doesn't get to finish this sentence either. There's a clashing mess of keypad tones, and when Pete looks at the screen of his phone, the call's been cut off.

It's kind of fucked up that Patrick was so frustrated that he totally missed the _end_ button, or maybe threw his phone across the room, but at least Pete noticed right away when the call ended, this time. Pete loves his blackberry, but he misses dial tones.

~

Knowing that Patrick does not want to hear from him in no way makes Pete want to talk to him less.

The problem is, Patrick actually checks his email and reads his text messages, even if he's busy, because he is a professional. And then he gets mad if it's not worth the time he's spent on it. Then double-mad for each additional interruption.

In the midst of an epic youtube crawl, Pete wishes that he could just send stuff to Patrick, to get it out of his brain.

Pete knows the value of having different outlets to suit his mood. Patrick needs a fun account.

Patrick Stump, welcome to Twitter.

~

It's a brilliant solution: make a twitter account for Patrick, Pete can tweet at him all he wants, and then when Patrick's out of the studio, Pete can just hand over the login info and Patrick can catch up. The captcha text is _andy decided_ , which seems like a blessing.

Because he is not a pathetic loser, he doesn't put Patrick's name on it. Someone would catch that in a second, and the last thing he needs is people thinking he's trying to put actual words in Patrick's mouth. He just needs a dead letter office to send stuff to.

The truth is, there are a lot of things that Pete doesn't need to say _to_ anyone. When he just needs to say them, it turns out that twitter is perfect for that. It's even better than a blog, because he can just send a phrase out there to rattle around the internet, without even the expectation of context or coherence. Sometimes his @ replies turn into a game of retweet telephone where the words bounce back to him better than they left.

Most of the people Pete talks to get so much traffic that it's not worth usually the tweetspace and the likelihood of typos to use their name, anyway. Either they'll see it, or they won't. If it's important, he's got 5 other ways to get the message to them.

Unless someone asks him a question, he mostly uses names like tags so he can find things again, to make his brain think, "oh, that video I told Mikey about."

It turns out, that once he has a handy record of what he's said to Patrick, that he wants to tell Patrick basically everything.

~

It wasn't supposed to be a big thing. Pete was just going to tweet his share of random links and shit to Patrick, and then tell him about it in a day or two, when Patrick had some time to chill, and then it'd be awesome, and Patrick could change the name to whatever he wanted.

Two weeks later, @notyourlostboy has 400 followers, despite the fact that there is not a single tweet, and no useful biography information.

Pete decides to go through and block the porn spammers so that Patrick will finally see the beauty of social networking when Pete gives him the account. It turns out that most of "Patrick's" followers are fans, people who've retweeted some of Pete's stuff, or have names from their lyrics. It seems like a bad move for "Patrick" to alienate his fans, so he leaves them alone.

~

They go back out on tour, and Pete is exploding with things that need to be said at inappropriate times. Just because he's lonely and miserable at 5 am doesn't mean that everyone else has to be. Twitter still loves him, even if he doesn't understand half the shit that gets tweeted back from the other side of the planet.

The second time that he catches himself yelling at Patrick for not remembering something that Pete tweeted at him, followed by curious looks from half the tour, Pete decides that maybe he should just send direct messages to lessen the chance of self-incrimination. Pete is not good at compartmentalizing his brain, and at some point it stopped being things that Pete would normally have said and saved for later, and started being things that even he knew better than to say aloud.

This puts a whole new spin on that fucking _Medium and Message_ class he'd taken. Pete wonders if its possible to manipulate people with words that they never hear.

~

Another week passes, and Pete is definitely going to go through and delete some of the things he's tweeted at Patrick before he shows him the account. And most of the direct messages he's sent. Patrick's twitter inbox looks like brain spew concentrate: just add vodka to reconstitute Bad Emo Poetry. He also spends an inappropriate amount of time talking about Patrick's hands.

~

The thing is, Pete knows an intervention when he sees one. This is the first internet-related one he's been a party to, though.

"You're not exactly a technological ninja, Pete. The password is WendyDarling backwards."

Current opinion to the contrary, Pete is not an idiot. The only thing more embarrassing than having a secret twitter account that only he talks to would be having a secret twitter account that he can't remember the fucking password to when he needs to clean it up a bit. Or delete it. Which was apparently about 24 hours ago.

"We were worried, Pete," Patrick says.

"You were acting crazy," Andy says.

"For real crazy, not just you-crazy," Joe interjects helpfully.

"Andy figured it out. He recognized some of the stuff you were talking about from your tweets."

~

"I don't think they read most of it," Patrick says later, just when the worst of the embarrassment has started to fade.

"Mmrg," Pete tells the inside of his elbow.

Patrick moves his hand from the touchpad - Pete has been listening to him tap back in time through the archive of humiliation - to grip Pete's shoulder. "Just because I want to kill you, it doesn't mean I want you to stop talking to me," Patrick says. "Even when I don't want to hear what you're saying, keep talking, okay?" Patrick tightens his hold, and Pete shifts his head to that he can see stripes of Patrick's face between hair and hoodie. "To the real me, not the one in your head or your computer."

"Real you," Pete says, "Right," and slides along the bench until he's tucked against Patrick's side.


End file.
